Has your child shed tears over the amount of homework he has? Has he stayed up until 10 p.m. working on assignments? Have you sacrificed your weekends for homework?
"Kids today are overwhelmed!" a parent recently wrote in an email to GreatSchools.org "My first-grade son was required to research a significant person from history and write a paper of at least two pages about the person, with a bibliography. How can he be expected to do that by himself? He just started to learn to read and write a couple of months ago. Schools are pushing too hard and expecting too much from kids."
"The last 20 years or so have been the period when there has been the strongest consensus that homework is a good thing and that more is better. Very recently, in the last five years or so, there has been some evidence that that consensus is starting to crack." — Brian Gill, Rand Corporation
Diane Garfield, a fifth-grade teacher in San Francisco, concurs. "I believe that we're stressing children out," she says.
But hold on, it's not just the kids who are stressed out. "Teachers nowadays assign these almost college-level projects with requirements that make my mouth fall open with disbelief," says another frustrated parent. "It's not just the kids who suffer!"
"How many people take home an average of two hours or more of work that must be completed for the next day?" asks Tonya Noonan Herring, a New Mexico mother of three, an attorney and a former high school English teacher. "Most of us, even attorneys, do not do this. Bottom line: students have too much homework and most of it is not productive or necessary."
Homework studies
How do educational researchers weigh in on the issue? According to Brian Gill, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation, there is no evidence that kids are doing more homework than they did before.
"If you look at high school kids in the late '90s, they're not doing substantially more homework than kids did in the '80s, '70s, '60s or the '40s," he says. "In fact, the trends through most of this time period are pretty flat. And most high school students in this country don't do a lot of homework. The median appears to be about four hours a week."
Education researchers like Gill base their conclusions, in part, on data gathered by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests.
"It doesn't suggest that most kids are doing a tremendous amount," says Gill. "That's not to say there aren't any kids with too much homework. There surely are some. There's enormous variation across communities. But it's not a crisis in that it's a very small proportion of kids who are spending an enormous amount of time on homework."
Etta Kralovec, author of
The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning, disagrees, saying NAEP data is not a reliable source of information. "Students take the NAEP test and one of the questions they have to fill out is, 'How much homework did you do last night' Anybody who knows schools knows that teachers by and large do not give homework the night before a national assessment. It just doesn't happen. Teachers are very clear with kids that they need to get a good night's sleep and they need to eat well to prepare for a test.
"So asking a kid how much homework they did the night before a national test and claiming that that data tells us anything about the general run of the mill experience of kids and homework over the school year is, I think, really dishonest."
Further muddying the waters is a
AP/AOL poll that suggests that most Americans feel that their children are getting the right amount of homework. It found that 57% of parents felt that their child was assigned about the right amount of homework, 23% thought there was too little and 19% thought there was too much.
Shotgun homework
"What typically happens is people give what we call 'shotgun homework': blanket drills, questions and problems from the book. On a national level that's associated with less well-functioning school systems," he says. "In a sense, you could sort of think of it as a sign of weaker teachers or less well-prepared teachers. Over time, we see that in elementary and middle schools more and more homework is being given, and that countries around the world are doing this in an attempt to increase their test scores, and that is basically a failing strategy."
